There is something to be said about being surrounded by people also devoting their full energy to learning something.

It’s more inspiring and fulfilling than being alone with a YouTube video. Also you might make life long friends or meet the love of your life.

The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.

The better analogy would be "Tools should be paid for by the mechanic". Experienced ones tend to have $10K+ worth of tools that they paid for.

Your mechanic is an independent entrepreneur. If they work in a shop with other mechanics, they for sure don't each have duplicate $10k sets of tools.

Well, I am my own mechanic, and worked for multiple shops before I started doing this. Everyone owns their own tools.

Media is so expensive now that it inspired me to take up sailing instead. It’s nice to get outside.

Did you buy a boat with the money not being spent on media, or using that money to pay for renting? Either way, it made me think of the old saying, "the two happiest day's in a man's life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells that boat".

Can’t they just get away with this by claiming they were doing AI research and their agent broke out of their sandbox?

It’s not a breach. It’s a load-bearing resilience exercise

Provenance.

I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?

Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.

Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.

I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.

I just use garmin watches to track health stuff. I would literally jump for joy if there were a free alternative software and hardware stack to replace this watch or at the very least a cycling computer.

The market is pretty bad, they will get someone who lives in a low cost of living state who will take it.

I recently bought an external cdrom for my laptop. The library here has a wonderful cd collection.